


know who I love

by elizajane



Series: On the Strength of the Evidence [27]
Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Consensual Infidelity, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Found Families, M/M, Summer, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 04:41:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9965588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: "How do you think they're getting on, then?" Caro nods toward Sidney and Geordie. "Sidney's seemed a bit...quiet since we've arrived?"A summer holiday fic meant to be read alongside Crowgirl'sMade Glorious Summer





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kivrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin/gifts).



After two days of rain that had kept them indoors, doing puzzles and reading _Swallowdale_  aloud to keep the children occupied, they wake on their third day in Ardalanaish to a brilliant blue sky and a fair wind.

"Thank heaven," Cathy says looking the kitchen window as they’re tidying up the breakfast dishes. "We can finally take the children down to the beach and run them up and down the beach until they tire themselves out."

"Caro!" Geordie calls from outside the kitchen door. "D'you remember where we put the hand cart end of last year? It's not in the shed that I can see."

Caro drops the towel she's been using to dry the dishes as Sidney washes them and sticks her head out into the yard, squinting against the sun. "See if young Johnny put it out in the carriage house -- I think I saw it there when I was parking the car on Monday."

Geordie, with Sidney's help, unearths the cart from beneath a tarpaulin in the back corner of the carriage house. Cathy puts together the picnic hamper while Caro brews enough coffee to fill both thermoses full and they pile everything into the cart along with blankets and a beach umbrella and enough towels to dry those who decide to brave the cold waters of the Atlantic. They wedge Davie in atop the blankets, Sidney swings Ivy up on his shoulders, and they set off down the well-worn path to the beach with Dickens, ecstatic, running on ahead.

They've been bringing the children to the cottage at Ardalanaish every August since Dora was born. The first summer it had just been Cathy and Caro with Esme and the baby and Caro's parents had joined them for two dreadful weeks out of the four. They'd vowed never to do that again. Thankfully Caro's parents had chosen the following year to declare their disinterest in returning to the Highlands -- effectively ceding use of Linnhe Lodge to the next generation.

Geordie had been able to get away for only one long weekend, that first year, but as he's risen in seniority he's been able to join them for longer. This summer -- the first summer that Sidney's been included in the family's vacation plans -- he and Sidney have managed to scrounge and scrape together two coinciding weeks of leave.

Dropping behind the group to fiddle with the settings on her new Coronet, Caro lifts the camera and frames the rest of the family in the viewer: Cathy with Dora by the hand and Esme beside them carrying shovel and pail; Geordie pushing the cart and making faces at a laughing Davie; Sidney and Ivy several paces ahead with Dickens, Ivy's head in a bright yellow sun bonnet bobbing with the rhythm of Sidney's strides. She depresses the shutter and then winds the film and takes another for good measure.

The beach at Linnhe Lodge is in a sheltered alcove at the bottom of a steep, winding descent, cut off from the sandy stretch of beach on either side at high tide by rocky outcroppings that stretch out into the waves. They're sheltered from the wind, at least enough to lay out the blankets above the tumble of flotsam and jetsam that represents the last high tide, anchoring the corners with pieces of driftwood and their cast-off shoes.

"Daddy! Daddy!" Dora says, jumping up and down with the pent-up giddiness of two long days inside. "Can we go swimming, Daddy?!" This is only the second year that Dora is old enough to be given permission to swim in the ocean.

"Give me a minute, love," Geordie says, as he and Cathy anchor the great canvas umbrella against gusts that make it past the high cliffs.

"I've got her," Sidney says, kicking off his shoes and starting to unbutton his shirt. Caro grins to herself as she catches the distraction on Geordie's face in the viewfinder.

"Not that I'm ungrateful for the run of the Lodge," Cathy says, smoothing her skirts under her as she sits down next to Caro on the largest of the moth-eaten blankets that have long since been re-purposed for picnicking. "But after two days cooped up indoors..." She puts up a hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the sun and looks down to the water’s edge where Geordie has joined Sidney, Esme, and Dora in the shallows. "I’ll not deny I had begun to consider sending the girls outside to play no matter the weather just to have a bit of calm."

Davie, too young to play in the water, and Ivy, who dislikes the feel of the saltwater on her skin, are digging in the sand to Caro's left. She turns the camera and adjusts the settings to capture the light and shadow of the hills and valleys they're busily creating. "Mmm," she replies, because she's thinking about others in the household who may have started to feel a bit...crowded in the past two days. "How do you think they're getting on, then?" She nods toward Sidney and Geordie. "Sidney's seemed a bit...quiet since we've arrived?"

Cathy sighs, pulling out the half-finished sweater that’s gained an arm and a half over the past two days, arranges its bulk to her satisfaction, and picks up her needles. "If you mean that sense he carries with him that we're on the verge of driving him back to the ferry dock, and shoving a one-way ticket to Oban in his hand, I've asked Geordie and he's none the wiser."

Caro twitches her nose in irritation and trains her lens on Sidney, trying to determine what it is that they’re missing. She’d been hoping that handing over the coffee mugs and shooing him back upstairs to Geordie’s bed this morning would put him a bit more at ease. And, indeed, the two of them had come downstairs -- more than halfway through the breakfast of flapjacks and jam she had made for the children -- looking a bit sheepish and, to her eye, distinctly post-coital. But even sex hasn’t helped to dissipate that stubborn sense of…separateness Sidney carries within him.

She watches him, now, playing in the surf with Geordie and the older girls. Esme is teaching Dora how to shape rooster tails of ocean spray with her hands, and there seems to be a rather uneven battle taking shape between the two girls on one side, Geordie and Sidney on the other. The girls are winning.

As she watches from behind the camera -- _snap, wind, snap, wind, snap_ \-- Sidney turns in toward against Geordie under the guise of cowering from the girls' assault, and Caro doesn't miss the way Geordie's hand comes up, instinctively, to catch Sidney's upper arm. How Sidney doesn't pull away. _snap, wind_ \-- She lets the lever go as she looks back to Cathy's busy fingers.

"Well," she says, "let me see what I can do. Men have always found me easy to tell their troubles to."

* * *

She finds her moment at lunch when Geordie and Cathy are toweling the children dry and inspecting hands front and back before doling out hard-boiled eggs, bread, and cheese. Sidney, who had been helping the girls build a hop scotch grid out of seashells and driftwood, hangs back as Geordie and Cathy settle the kids to their meal.

Caro -- just returned from a walk down the beach -- pulls up short of the blanket, where Sidney is standing apart with a towel over his shoulders, and studies him from beneath her broad-brimmed sun hat. She considers the way his eyes are flicking between Cathy and Geordie and the children as if he's trying to solve a puzzle, the slightly drawn set of his mouth, and the beginnings of a frown beneath where his hair is curling damply against his forehead.

Caro turns her head to follow his gaze to where the Keatings are grouped together beneath the beach umbrella. There's Cathy on her knees, brushing sand from Ivy's palms with a kerchief, and Geordie peeling hard boiled eggs and handing them off to the girls as he finishes. Cathy turns to say something to him that's lost in a sudden gust of wind. He laughs as she turns back to give Dora's hands the same once-over she's given Ivy's. She could frame them in her lens right this moment and almost anyone who saw the photograph would imagine they were seeing the portrait of a perfectly ordinary family.

Everyone but her, and Nora and Dee -- and now Sidney, Caro thinks, with a private, pleased smile.

She side-steps over to where Sidney is shrugging on his shirt to protect his shoulders, belatedly, against the midday sun and nudges his sandy ankle with a toe. "Out with it," she says.

Sidney jumps like he's been caught doing something untoward. Not for the first time since their arrival, Caro watches him stop himself from glancing back over toward Geordie, then remember who it is he’s talking to and allow his eyes to flicker to where Geordie is sitting. She wonders how many times a day he stops himself from looking.

"It's not --" he begins, and then shakes his head. "It's nothing."

Caro raises what she knows from college lectures to be an eloquent professorial eyebrow.

Sidney sighs and looks down at his own hands where he's buttoned his shirt crooked and starts to unbutton and button it over again. "I don't want Geordie to worry. It's not important."

"And I'll be giving that exactly the consideration as it deserves," Caro responds tartly.

Sidney doesn't have an immediate reply and Caro stands next to him in undemanding silence, considering how long it will take for the incoming tide to wash the hopscotch game away. Sidney finishes buttoning his shirt and then shoves his hands in the pockets of his swim trunks, casting his gaze back over to the picnic under the umbrella. Geordie looks up from his work and catches Sidney watching, and Caro sees the smile in his eyes and the worry in his brow.

"Do you -- did you ever feel...out of place around them?" Sidney asks, his voice low enough that neither Cathy and Geordie, nor any of the children, will hear.

Caro thinks of their early-morning encounter over the coffee pot. _This is all very different_ , he'd said, a plaintive note in his voice. She doesn't think he's unhappy, exactly. Just a bit...un-moored. She forgets sometimes -- she knows all three of them do -- that there had ever been a time when this had been a strange, and occasionally awkward, arrangement.

Cathy and Geordie, she knows, would both be quick to reassure. Cathy because it is her way and Geordie because Sidney is that precious, already, to him. Caro thinks, perhaps, Sidney isn’t seeking reassurances. He has the restless mind of a scholar seeking answers.

"What I try to keep in mind," she says at last, "is that when I do feel out of place it is not because either Cathy or Geordie truly wishes me to feel that way."

"Sidney!" Cathy calls, "A sandwich?" And Sidney moves to take the offered bread and cheese. Caro catches his arm.

"There's a pub up the way in Bunessan," she says. "It's past time you and I took ourselves for a drink."

Sidney throws her sharp glance, as if to ask _What are you up to, Dr. Mackenzie?_ then nods. "Accepted," he says, and then goes to join the others. Caro hangs back for the last two exposures on the reel. _snap, wind, snap, wind_...and there's the film done. Maybe she'll drive it to the shop in Tobermory, the day after tomorrow, and see what story the photographs have to tell.

**Author's Note:**

> This began life as a comment!fic for Kivrin who was having a rough day. Thirty installments later, this had happened. 
> 
> After some discussion we decided to put the Mackenzie lodge at [Ardalanish Beach](http://www.isle-of-mull.net/attractions/beaches/ardalanish-beach/) on the Isle of Mull. Just imagine instead of a car park half a mile away from the beach there's a hunting lodge. 
> 
> Title from the Scottish folk song [I Know Where I'm Going](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Where_I'm_Going_\(song\)) which was featured in the delightful 1945 romance [I Know Where I'm Going](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Where_I%27m_Going!) filmed on the Isle of Mull.


End file.
